A century ago, an American Catholic did not need a book to tell him what a family was. Today most Catholics have never heard it preached.

Marriage has become a contract that can be ended, children a lifestyle choice, and the home a place the family sleeps between jobs and schools. The Church never taught any of this. What she did teach has gone unsaid from the pulpit for two generations, and a great many Catholics have grown up without hearing it at all.

Theology of the Family sets out what the Church has actually taught about the household, in sixteen chapters:

• The family as the first society, older than the State, and its origin in nature and in Genesis
• The ends of marriage, and why children come first among them
• Marriage as a sacrament, and the home as the domestic church
• The order of the household: the father's headship, the mother's place, equal dignity and different offices
• Fruitfulness, contraception, and responsible parenthood
• The child: his place in the Gospel, the spirit of childhood, and a mother's presence in the first years
• The rights and duties of parents, and what children owe their parents
• The claims the State and the market may and may not make on the family, including the family wage
• What has dissolved the modern household, and what restores it

The argument rests on Scripture, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Council of Trent and the Roman Catechism, and the popes, above all Leo XIII and Pius XI, and it meets the strongest modern objections directly. It is plain about what follows: that children are the first end of marriage, that fruitfulness is the ordinary obligation of married life, that a mother's presence in the home is not a luxury to be traded for a larger house, and that most of what keeps parents from their children today is chosen, not compelled.

This is not a popular book. It is a necessary one: for couples preparing for marriage, for parents, for priests who owe their people these teachings, and for anyone willing to ask what the old paths were and whether they might be walked again.